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In an interview at the University of Central Florida, novelist Emily St. John Mandel said, “You can make an argument that the world’s become more bleak, but I feel like we always think we’re living at the end of the world”. Her most recent novel, The Glass Hotel, published in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., is deeply concerned with the precipice that lies at the end of the world, featuring characters that are always threatening to cross it. At the center of the novel is Vincent, a young woman who lost her mother at an early age in a mysterious boating accident, who works as a bartender in a Canadian hotel. Vincent is a high school dropout who had a history of school suspension and other trouble in her youth. Her escape from this unfulfilling existence comes in the form of Jonathan Alkalaitis, the owner of the hotel she works in, who sweeps her up into an arrangement where she accepts a blank check from him to pretend to be his wife. It is revealed early on that this time in what she calls “the kingdom of money” will be short-lived, as Jonathan’s Ponzi scheme collapses around him and he is sentenced to life in prison. And years later, Vincent will disappear mysteriously off of a shipping vessel in the ocean.
Mandel weaves in a surrounding cast of characters: family members of both Vincent and Jonathan, victims of Jonathan’s Ponzi scheme, and some of Jonathan’s colleagues as well. Each character seems primed for disaster, Vincent’s half brother Paul is a lifelong drug addict whose health is often in peril. Most of Jonathan’s colleagues are aware that their scheme is bound to collapse, they will be sent to prison and exposed as morally corrupt frauds, while the reader knows that Jonathan’s clients’ lives will be set ablaze in a Bernie Madoff-esque public bonfire of loss. The novel seems constantly teetering on the edge of something, filled with a pervasive sense of dread and inevitability. Mandel begins at the end, with Vincent’s drowning, giving the reader the sense that no matter what happens in the narrative, it was always going to end in death.
The concept of duality is crucial to this novel—there are always two realities for each character. There is the real world and the spirit world, with blurry boundary in between; there is a rich world, “the kingdom of money”, and a poor world devoid of opportunities. Both Vincent and Jonathan imagine parallel timelines, worlds in which the chains of events in their lives was altered in one way or another, what they call “counterlives”. Many characters are visited by ghosts, spotting dead relatives or acquaintances at inopportune moments. Weaving throughout the many threads of the novel, it can be difficult for the reader to discern what is real and what is imagined. This confusion feels intentional, as Mandel deftly weaves together complicated narrative arcs, she purposely blurs the lines between the real and the spirit world. The novel seems to be unconcerned with fidelity to concrete reality, choosing instead to occupy the haunting space between the living world and the dream world.
Mandel has created a rich and textured atmosphere for her characters, who drift in and out of eerie but immersive landscapes. Readers looking for a thriller or mystery may be disappointed, most of the plot has been revealed half of the way through the novel, but what it is missing in twists and turns is made up for in weighty contemplations of mortality and morality alike. Mandel has crafted a beautiful novel for readers who aren’t afraid to lean into their darkest fears.